Why is the Internal Editor such a problem?

The Internal Critic, aka Internal Editor, is the part of your brain that points out every single thing that is wrong with whatever you are doing (whether that’s writing or making a fancy dinner for your in-laws), brings up the obvious impossibility of whatever giant task you are required to do (whether that is writing a bestselling novel, finishing your Ph.D. thesis by the end of the month, or doing that three-month project your boss just handed you that they need by the end of the week), and declares the logical flaws in the enticing vision you’re about to commit to (whether that is a much-too-good-to-be-true movie deal on your unfinished first novel, a sure-fire get-rich-quick investment tip from your cousin, or your dream job offer at triple your salary request from a place neither you nor anyone else has ever heard of – all they need is your credit card number so they can add you to their database…)

Everybody has an Internal Critic. Everybody, not just writers. Writers just talk about it more.

Writers, in fact, talk about it endlessly – every how-to-write book and blog I’ve ever seen has loads of advice on how to avoid, short-circuit, or shut down the Internal Editor. I’ve seen the existence of the I.E. blamed on years of formal education and on perfectionism. What I haven’t seen is much discussion of why the Internal Editor is so powerful.

I think that the main reason we listen to the Internal Editor comes from the fact that it is often right, to a greater or lesser degree. When it flags “She had went to town” as ungrammatical, it’s right. When it points out that “Do ewe no what happened?” contains two incorrect homonyms, it’s also right. It was right when, back in college, it warned you that you were going to run into trouble if you didn’t get started on that history paper now, because you couldn’t type fast enough to finish it if you left it for the last four hours before class.

Every time the Internal Editor is right – especially the times when listening to it saves your bacon – it gains credibility, and we become more likely to listen to it next time. Because let’s face it, none of us likes to fail even a little bit, even at something that’s not all that important to us.

The trouble begins with the fact that the Internal Editor/Critic is not just working on things like grammar, punctuation, and homonyms, where there is a really clear right/wrong answer. It’s also commenting on life decisions like how long you’re going to take to write your thesis or whether you should accept that dream job. But it gets credibility by being right … and it gets the same amount of credibility from spotting “She had went” as it does from keeping you from falling for that credit card scam. Since there are a whole lot more small grammar/punctuation/etc. things with clearly-right answers than there are major decisions where you can’t ever be really certain the decision was right, the Internal Editor/Critic generally builds up a lot of credibility over the course of a lifetime.

What the Internal Editor/Critic does not gain credibility from is noticing that one has done something right. Or pointing out that even though that technique failed miserably the last time you used it, it will work brilliantly in this book, right here, right now. The Internal Editor/Critic is trained to always look for negatives. (Internal Editors are not big on positive reinforcement, in my experience.)

On top of all that, writers tend to be voracious readers, which means we all have a mental stockpile of examples of writing we like (“good”) and writing we don’t like (“bad”) for the Internal Editor to draw on. Most of us also got a certain amount of training in literary analysis in the English/Language Arts classes we took in school. Consequently, our Internal Editors are highly skilled at spotting “bad” writing and places where our work doesn’t measure up.

The Internal Editor is not experimental, nor is it a risk-taker. And since most people who are (or who want to be) writers think fiction is really important, we want to get it right. And since the Internal Editor has demonstrated its ability to keep us from making mistakes, we tend to listen to it.

All of this results in two rather different problems:

1. The Internal Editor is dynamite at spotting problems where there are clear-cut rules (grammar, spelling, punctuation, syntax) to work with, but not as good at identifying problems in areas where there isn’t a clear right or wrong answer. “That is a cliché” may be perfectly true … but in this particular story, it may work perfectly due to plot considerations, characterization, thematic appropriateness, mood, or any number of other things. Yet because the I.E. has built up so much credibility, it is perilously easy to accept automatically that simply because the I.E. has flagged something, it is a problem that needs to be corrected.
2. For most of us, the Internal Editor has decades of practice at spotting things that are wrong, but the Internal Creative does not have nearly as much experience. This means that about 95% of the time, when the Internal Editor complains that something is wrong with this sentence/paragraph/chapter, we agree, but we don’t know how to fix it. This tends to bring writing progress to a screeching halt.

This is getting long, so I’ll save what I try to do about it for next week.